DIY Land Remediation

As great as the DIY movement is, there are some things that seem naturally beyond the capacity of the average individual non-professional. DIY Space Missions and DIY Nuclear Fusion for example, are two headings you’ll probably never read in an issue of Ready Made. Every once in while though it’s exciting to see our assumptions about the limits of DIY tested, expanding our conception of what we can achieve on our own. Especially when that involves making the city a better place.

Land remediation is exactly one of those topics that would seem to go beyond DIY — a niche practice reserved for experts and specialty land trusts, usually costing upwards of millions of dollars for large-scale remediation. As a result, we have become accustomed to accepting fallow ground as an unavoidable result of the post-industrial city that can’t be dealt with, without a major infusion of cash and a resultant high-profile revenue generating development to recuperate those costs.

Not so, says urban designer Kaja Kühl, who along with a team of researchers, has developed a method and user’s guide for cheap small-scale phytoremediation. A Field Guide to Phytoremediation is a handbook on how to remove contaminants from land using plants. Kühl shows how, with a little bit of patience, land can be cleared of contaminants through strategic planting and subsequent dumping of plants, at a fraction of the cost of conventional Excavation and Fill techniques. The only flipside is that phytoremediation can take several years — which is not a problem when we consider that most contaminated brownfields sit fallow for several years anyway. Most importantly, the Field Guide shows how any enterprising individual can kickstart the process of phytoremediation on a piece of land, without waiting for large corporations or the City to take action. A full PDF of the Field Guide can be downloaded here.

With plenty of experience in manufacturing prefab design, IKEA has launched a modular refugee shelter that can be set up in only four hours at any place in the world. The light-weight construction comprises of a steel frame with insulated light-weight polymer panels and comes flat-packed in a cardboard box, like all IKEA furniture. The panels, pipes, connectors and wires can be assembled pretty easily thanks to a classic IKEA manual.

The next revolution in architecture comes without the architect. WikiHouse is the first open source platform for house design. It enables anybody, including non-design professionals, to design houses with Google’s free 3D design software SketchUp and instantly print and build them. Design your own dream house with the help of the crowd and a plywood printer. WikiHouse…

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, 23 years ago, Bulgaria was one of the many countries that moved away from communism. The legalization of private ownership of production enabled the Bulgarians to start their own businesses, but rents of store spaces were too high for them. As a result, loads of fascinating, little basement shops popped up along the sidewalks of the country’s capital Sofia.

Cities often try to find solutions against the excess of advertising in public space. Shop owners and entrepreneurs are forbidden to have light signs or banners that affect the visual character of the public domain too much. Such happened in São Paulo for instance, where the mayor decided to remove all advertising in public space….